At Towards Maturity, we love it when we find an example of an organisation that refuses to flinch from business critical issues and uses innovative and creative e-learning content to bring about the desired results. BT Retail won the 2011 e-learning Award for best use of rapid e-learning for their use of short, sharp video content to ensure that business critical learning is delivered and put into practice by staff as rapidly as possible.

BT sets itself high standards for its 13 million consumers and 1 million business customers, and whenever they call, BT strives to respond rapidly, resolving issues in one contact. To achieve this, the company has to provide its staff with the ability to respond quickly to meet customer needs and allow them to get back on track!

However, with fourteen thousand advisors connecting with customers, who have to be kept up-to-date about how to rectify the breakages, this is no mean feat. The dilemma that faced BT Retail was simple: how is it possible to deliver training that will improve the effectiveness of call-centre staff whilst at the same time avoid the huge costs associated with removing advisers from their front-line positions?

What was needed was an e-learning intervention that would:

Save the the company costly training

Respond to the learning needs of its advisors

Produce rapid and highly responsive training for issues that need to be fixed NOW!

The answer was the production of The Learning Channel that hosted a specically built SharePoint, which allowed staff to access short, sharp videos of approx 3 – 5 minutes, giving them the required information at their work posts.

Note from the Editor – Evidence for Change

We have included this story in our Evidence for Change programme because the impact of the new technology and approach to training upon the trainees and the organisation has been impressive: